Does it still seem difficult to understand, use, etc? did you come across anything positive?
tumblr and reddit and twitter shit the bed (and it looks like youtube’s reaching for the exlax), if it was only one, i don’t think i’d have made the jump. I’ve also discovered that I don’t actually care about the difference between a handful of people and a few hundred thousand in mini-communities like these.
I am fueled by my deep, loathing hatred for the snoo site. Plus I found a really great local instance where people are pretty chill.
Honestly, the loss of Reddit is Fun. I’d say that roughly ~95% of the time I spent on reddit was through mobile, I hardly ever used it on the computer anymore (although funnily enough, years ago it was the opposite, I almost exclusively accessed it via computer). Opening up RIF repeatedly on the day it died, just from muscle memory, is what made me finally decide to look up how to join Lemmy. I had been considering it for awhile, but sticking with Reddit was juuuust easy enough to keep me from doing it, even with the drastic quality drop in reddit over the years. But by blocking RIF/etc, they removed that “easy enough” part, which meant nothing was really keeping me from deciding to finally make the jump.
Still can’t say I fully understand the fediverse, I definitely don’t. But I do understand it slightly more than I did before, and certainly enough to at least try to interact and comment!
Twitter and Reddit got so awful I needed to leave. Lemmy is fantastic and underpopulated, but Mastodon isn’t what I would want. I can search for hastags, but there’s no other way to search beyond the instance I’m in. That’s not what I want. I want a space that I can curate AND I want a local community. I got the latter, but the former…not so much.
So in a sense, I’m still a skeptic. But what else is there?
I’m still very sceptical. While I love the idea of the fediverse, I honestly don’t think it will ever be more than a niche platform. It will probably remain active among “enthusiasts” but I can’t see it ever going mainstream.
It’s just not simple enough. If some non-tech person wants to join Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or Instagram, they just go to the site or app, sign up, and that’s it. No decisions need to be made, there is nothing to understand. My 70 year old mother could do it.
Joining lemmy is a commitment. And more importantly, it requires decisions to be made. Which server should I join? What difference will it make? Am I doing it wrong? Why are there different communities with the same name but on different servers? Why is there no ‘lemmy’ app? Etc.
Those of us who are here have made the effort to understand these things, but the general population won’t bother.
To be honest, most of these issues could be solved using abstraction, and lemmy world already does that to some extend. Giving the site the look and feel of a single website, with one simple way to join and participate will be vital. I’m not saying to remove those decisions, but rather have them on another layer so advanced users can still easily access them, while other users who are either new or don’t care too much about it can just use a common preset.
